Basic demand from enterprises towards academic education: provide students not only methodological/theoretical knowledge, but also prepare them for the future tasks in the world of works! This contradicts academia’s focus on sustainably teaching basic principles. With the extra-curricular international online program erp4students, we successfully managed to bridge this "conflict-of-interest”.

In this paper, we introduce the international program erp4students as general example on how to successfully prepare university students for the world of works without having to give up the basic principle in higher education, i.e., to exclusively provide sustainable education. We start with introducing the basic concept and design of the program and provide information regarding the demographic development over the past decade and implemented quality assurance mechanisms. Subsequently, the scope and design of and hitherto achieved insights from the Learning Culture Survey are outlined. On the basis of found results, we finally discuss how erp4students can deal with possible culture-specific issues that latest might emerge when the program gets available for learners in the Asian context.

Job-related migration has been fostered across Europe balancing unemployment in one country with demands for employees in others. However, the numbers of early school leavers and university dropouts significantly increased in the hosting countries. We propose a higher measure of cultural sensitivity in education in order to prevent frustration. The Learning Culture Survey investigates learners’ expectations towards and perceptions of education on international level with the aim to make culture in the context of education better understandable. After a brief introduction, we subsume the steps taken during the past seven years and found results. Subsequently, we introduce a method for the determination of conflict potential, which bases on the understanding of culture as the level to which people within a society accept deviations from the usual. We close with demonstrating the usefulness of the data and insights from our Learning Culture Survey in the context of practical scenarios.

Despite the opportunities and benefits of OER, research and practice has shown how the OER repositories have a hard time in reaching an active user-base. The opportunities of experience exchange and simple feedback mechanisms of social software have been realized for improving the situation and many are basing or transforming their OER offerings towards socially powered environments. Research on social software has shown how knowledge-sharing barriers in online environments are highly culture and context-specific and require proper investigation. It is crucial to study what challenges might arise in such environments and how to overcome them, ensuring a successful uptake. A large-scale (N = 855) cross-European investigation was initiated in the school context to determine which barriers teachers and learners perceive as critical. The study highlights barriers on cultural distance, showing how those are predicted by nationality and age of the respondents. The paper concludes with recommendations for overcoming those barriers.

With a focus on Technology Enhanced Learning, this paper investigates if and to which extent a culture shift can be expected alongside with the adoption of currently emerging Web 3.0 technologies. Instead of just offering new opportunities for the field to improve education, such a culture shift could lead to unexpected general consequences not just for Technology Enhanced Learning but the whole educational sector. Understanding the dimension of expectable changes enables us to prevent conflicts and pointedly support culture-related change processes. After an introduction of the Revised Onion Model of Culture, which, later on, serves as theoretical foundation, expectable changes in the design of learning scenarios are analysed, distinguishing the stakeholder groups “learners” and “educators”. Eventually, the found changes are analysed to which extent a general culture shift is to be expected in order to understand the transferability and limitations of future research results in the field.

The Learning Culture Survey investigates learners’ expectations towards and perceptions of education on international level with the aim to make culture in the context of education better understandable and support educators to prevent and solve intercultural conflicts in education. So far, we found that culture-related expectations differ between educational settings, depend on the age of the learners, and that a nationally homogenous educational culture is rather an exception than the rule. The results of our recently completed longitudinal study provided evidence that educational culture on the institutional level actually is persistent, at least over a term of four years. After a brief introduction of the general background, we will subsume the steps taken during the past seven years and achieved general insights regarding educational culture. Last, we will introduce a method for the determination of conflict potential, which bases on the understanding of culture as the level to w hich people within a society accept deviations from the usual. We close with demonstrating the method’s functionality on examples from the Learning Culture Survey.

Managing the needs of learners is crucial in order to support their motivation and keep dropout rates on a low level. With the constantly growing level of internationalization in classrooms, the variety of different context-specific requirements from learners increase; without a profound understanding of the learners’ contexts, successfully maintaining a culture-sensitive and learner-focussed education is impossible. A solution to reach this understanding is the open exchange of experiences and knowledge amongst educators of the different contexts. In this paper, we will briefly introduce the two European projects “Open Discovery Space” (ODS) and “Inspiring Science Education” (ISE), which have the aim to foster the establishment and improvement of Open Educational Practices in the context of school education. The purpose of this paper is to attract and invite potential partners to affiliate with, contribute to, and profit from the projects.

After an introduction, we discuss the conflicts that occurred in a highly experimental course setting, in which we implemented a student-centered course in urban higher education with a constructivist, blended-learning design. We analyse to which extent the cultural country profiles from our Learning Culture Survey suffice to prevent intercultural conflicts in education and provide support for the design of respective interventions.

Many e-Learning-basedoffers, such as international programs and MOOCs have long since overcome the concept of national education and are designed to attract learners distributed throughout the world. In order to cope with the differences between learners, related offers often include opportunities to support the particular learning styles and learning pace beyond the advantages, which the technology itself naturally provides. Examples arethe individual configuration of the learning platformand display of contents and the provision of stylistically diverse and supplementary learning material. Such measures are relatively easy to implement andonce established, do not generate further expenses. Just, is it appropriate to lay the full responsibility for designing a comfortable (and supportive) learning environment into the hands of the learners and do they get along with such a responsibility? We asked university students from three continents regarding their expectations towards instructor-support and found major differences.

Culture, at least to some extent, is related to particular (individual and collective) experiences. In terms of education, this means that a learner, who experienced particular services in his/her past, might perceive such services as usual for educational culture and thus, expect them to be delivered in any kind of learning scenario. In German universities, education is meant to be a full-time job and usually is designed to provide a broad basis of theoretical and methodological knowledge. Achieving methodological competences is a core goal of German academic education: Once a student leaves the university, he/she is expected to decide about appropriate methods for any kind of problem (in the field of study and beyond) and how to modify the known methods in case of need. In contrast, in professional training, the learners have to study in extra-occupational situations (time is a serious issue) and might expect training that pointedly prepares them for very specific tasks. We assumed that scenarios of professional training have their own educational cultures. When designing learning contents and learning scenarios for professional training, it might be essential for the learning success to meet the learners’ expectations and contextual peculiarities.
We found remarkable differences between the results of the investigated enterprises, but even more significant diversity between the results of the German enterprises and the priory investigated German universities. As a general conclusion we can assume that generalizing research results that were solely achieved from national university students might lead to an inappropriate design of learning scenarios for particular professional contexts. Professional training for a particular enterprise should be developed according to its specific educational culture.

Open educational resources (OERs) provide opportunities as enablers of societal development, but they also create new challenges. From the perspective of content providers and educational institutions, particularly, cultural and context-related challenges emerge. Even though barriers regarding large-scale adoption of OERs are widely discussed, empirical evidence for determining challenges in relation to particular contexts is still rare. Such context-specific barriers generally can jeopardize the acceptance of OERs and, in particular, social OER environments. We conducted a large-scale (N = 855) cross-European investigation in the school context to determine how teachers and learners perceive cultural distance as a barrier against the use of social OER environments. The findings indicate how nationality and age of the respondents are strong predictors of cultural distance barrier. The study concludes with identification of context-sensitive interventions for overcoming the related bar riers. These consequences are vital for OER initiatives and educational institutions for aligning their efforts on OER.

One idea behind Open Educational Resources (OERs) is opening up the access to learning resources for stakeholders who were not the originally targeted users. Even though making educational resources available for the public already is a remarkable achievement, their usefulness often is limited to a very particular context because of unclear or missing appropriateness regarding other contexts. In this paper, contextual appropriateness is investigated as a special quality criterion for OERs. We will introduce barriers against the use of OERs and demands from the educational community that need to be addressed in order to overcome such barriers. We will show that the hitherto implemented quality standards for Technology Enhanced Learning do not yet fully support such particular demands and discuss which additional steps are required for the context of OERs. We conclude with an outlook and recommendations that can open up the full potential of OERs.

The aim of our research is preserving the learners’ initial motivation in educational settings by avoiding unnecessary conflicts that could decrease the learners’ joy of learning. In order to get a better understanding of particularly cul-ture-related factors that could jeopardize the learners’ motivation in international e-Learning scenarios, we devel-oped and exemplarily implemented the standardized questionnaire ‘Learning Culture’ in the Higher Education contexts of Germany and South Korea. Regarding motivation, we analysed how the students evaluated their own motivational predispositions towards outer influences, their purpose of learning and affections towards particular knowledge, and their strategies to deal with educational tasks that appear unmanageable or too difficult for them.

In this paper, we present a solution how to test cultural influences on E-Learning in a global context. Based on a metadata approach, we show how specifically cultural influence factors can be determined to transfer and adapt learning environments. We present a method how those influence factors can be validated for both, to improve the dynamical meta-data specification and to be used in the development of (international) E-Learning scenarios.

In this paper we summarize our research on international educational contexts and transfer the results to the context of urban life-long learning. We will show that a collection and provision of relevant data can help instructors as well as learners to raise their awareness regarding contextual differences, to develop a higher level of acceptance regarding differences, and thus, in the long term, avoid frustration in educational processes and reduce drop out-rates.

In the context of Internet-based e-Learning, including an international auditory is a logical consequence. However, due to uncertainty regarding the foreign learners, e-Learning programs often are limited to local or national participants. Understanding the different expectations of learners regarding instructor-support is one step in order to enable providers of educational services to tailor educational programs that fit the requirements of an international auditory. We asked university students in five countries regarding their expectations towards instructor-support and found major differences between the investigated countries.